Doug E

An African man, house & electronic music #edm, #mufc, #wrc, #numbers, #farmer, Either now or never!

[Bankelele @bankelele]

No projects happen at Lamu because NGOs on the beach want it to stay marginalised and oppose port, coal, road.. - Muthoni MCA #thecoaldebate

[Doug E @kipkalom]

@XivTroy @Arden_Abedi On this subject....can cycling replace running being easy on the legs....I'm considering it

[Doug E @kipkalom]

@CSakwah Not today satan!

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Steve Wozniak designed the first two Apple computers almost entirely on his own. After hours, at a desk in his apartment, while he still had a day job at HP. He calls himself shy, and the advice he gives young engineers runs opposite to how a modern office works: work alone, not on a committee, not on a team.

That work grew into a trillion-dollar company. The man who drew up the designs would have a rough time in a modern job interview, where the person who fills the silence usually wins the room.

That gap has a price. Across decades of research, extroversion is the strongest predictor of who gets chosen as a leader, and who gets rated effective once they are in the chair. Getting chosen and delivering results are two different things. Companies have spent years building their hiring around the first one.

When Wharton's Adam Grant tracked what the stores earned, the gap showed up in cash. At a national pizza chain, branches run by introverted managers pulled in 14% higher profits when the staff were proactive, the kind who bring ideas and push for a better way to do the job. Extroverted managers came out ahead only when their people stayed quiet and waited for orders. In a later test where teams raced to fold t-shirts, the proactive teams led by extroverts folded 28% fewer. The louder boss kept talking over the people holding the answers.

The room itself fights deep work too. Two Fortune 500 companies knocked down their office walls to spark collaboration, and Harvard researchers had people wear sensors to track what changed. Face-to-face talk fell about 70%. Email rose 56%, instant messaging 67%. People slid on headphones and disappeared into their screens, so the layout built for the loud crowd left everyone talking less.

Somewhere between a third and half of all people are introverts, and the company that makes the Myers-Briggs test puts it closer to 57%. That is not a fringe the system can shrug off. At the very top the filter even loosens: about 40% of top executives are introverts and another 40% extroverts, based on McGill researcher Karl Moore and his interviews with 350 of them.

So the tweet lands. Corporate careers do not like introverts. They just keep mistaking the most comfortable person in the room for the most capable one, and the cost of that swap is sitting right there in the numbers.

[Silas Nyanchwani @nyanchwani]

Kenyan Millennial Men Have No Plan B

Kenyan men die young. The average male life expectancy is about 62, and healthy life expectancy, the years you actually live in good health, is closer to 57. So even the so-called average man spends his final years unwell.

Pick a random sample of twenty men in their thirties, and a startling number are already fatherless. Their old men are long dead, or they were never there to begin with: present but deadbeat, or absent and deadbeat, take your pick. Very few men have the privilege of seeing their fathers live into their 80s and 90s.

If I show up in my village right now, the men in their 40s and 50s have already begun to thin out. Between 60 and 75, there are almost none, and the rare one who reaches his mid-70s suddenly has a real shot at 85 and beyond. It is a silent crisis, and you never notice it until you are 40, marrying again, needing uncles to escort you, only to realize there are no uncles left, only cousins.

Our fathers’ generation was wasted by HIV/AIDS and by the economic collapse of the late 1980s and 1990s, a collapse engineered in part by World Bank and IMF prescriptions, the structural adjustment programs, not unlike what is being done to us now. Many in Gen Z may not know this, but there was a time when this country actually made things. The Western Kenya belt ran on sugar: Chemelil, Muhoroni, Nzoia, Mumias, Sony.

Webuye had Pan Paper. There were cotton ginneries and pyrethrum, and coffee farming spread as far as Kisii. Nakuru was busy as hell. So was Kitale, and even small outposts like Kilgoris. Thika was big, big, and industrial. Then, within a decade, the factories went quiet, the parastatals were privatized, and every plant that shut, every institution that was sold off, took real livelihoods and real families down with it.

People retreated to the countryside. I still remember the prettiest girl who transferred to our school. I would vote for Ruto if that is what it takes to find out how her life turned out. She looked like she had lived a cushioned life somewhere, only to land in rural Kisii, in a jigger-infested classroom. Those were the real-time adjustments that millennials rarely talk about. Maybe that is part of why so many of us are quietly traumatized.

As I said, our fathers at least had a Plan B: ancestral land, and our mothers.

As men, we romanticize our independence now, and some treat marriage as a woman’s backup plan, but in the 1980s and 90s, it was often a wife’s ingenuity that kept the whole family alive. And for the many men who died early, leaving behind young, bewildered widows, it was the women who carried the weight of raising everyone, without taking anything away from the men who did their part.

For a while, between roughly 2005 and 2015, I honestly believed millennial men would escape our fathers’ fate. Now I am not so sure. More and more millennial men are walking into something worse than what their fathers faced.

Where the late 1980s and 1990s lost a generation of productive men and women to HIV/AIDS, the late 2010s and 2020s are killing men with something quieter: a broken economy, made worse by terrible political choices, a shaky global situation, and a future nobody can read. As Darius Okolla has argued, millennials are the first generation here to enter adulthood under this much uncertainty.

For our parents, marriage and a home of your own, even a badly built one, were realistic dreams. Plenty of millennials did manage to put up decent houses in the towns ringing Nairobi. But far more never accumulated enough to reach escape velocity from poverty. It is those born in the late 1980s and 1990s who hurt the most: bright enough to get into college and raised to believe that education was the key to everything. What a cruel joke that has turned out to be.

A huge share of graduates since 2014 have never held a properly structured formal job, the kind you keep consistently for five years, long enough to set yourself up for the basics. So instead of marrying, a man in this position ends up with a baby mama, and often cannot even provide for the baby. Just yesterday, I was talking with a younger Gen Z cousin about the recent spike in new HIV infections, and she told me, plainly, that she keeps condoms on her because some of the young men she meets cannot even afford one. That is not a joke, man.

And here is the part that should frighten you: this is the same machine that took our fathers. After years of steady decline, from about 94,000 new HIV infections at the peak down to roughly 16,000 in 2024, new infections jumped again in 2025, past 20,000, the first reversal in years. The cause is almost insultingly familiar. When the United States froze PEPFAR and USAID funding, prevention collapsed almost overnight. Testing fell, PrEP uptake halved, and young people aged 15 to 24 now account for about four in every ten new infections. Donor money built the wall that held the disease back, and the moment it was pulled, the disease started walking back through. History is not repeating. It is rhyming, and it is rhyming in our generation. Worse, our government, like so many across Africa, rarely wants to solve some of these basic problems.

Now that we are in our 40s, economic depression is a silent killer. No amount of motivation, no think piece, no pep talk will bail a man out. At some point, you need the only thing that actually works: money.

Our economy began its slow collapse around 2015. Some of the rot traces back to the 2008-09 global crash; the West never fully recovered, and when America sneezes, the rest of us still catch the cold. But the deeper wounds were self-inflicted. We raised a Eurobond of roughly Sh 200 billion, and to this day the Auditor General cannot fully account for it; by the official reckoning, around a billion dollars has never been traced to any actual project. We built a wildly overpriced SGR. The effects were immediate. As Eurobond repayments and other loans came due, cash drained out of the economy. The banks that used to hawk loans to us before 2015 found a far better customer in the government itself, and what little credit remained for ordinary people dried up.

Before long, counties stopped paying on time. Today, the unpaid bills are staggering: national government pending bills alone have exceeded Sh 500 billion, and the total, including counties, sits north of Sh 690 billion, much of it owed to small suppliers who have since folded. Taxes climbed, inflation climbed, companies issued profit warnings after profit warnings, and many shut, exactly as they did in the 1990s.

The economy kept shrinking, and in the meantime, we handed the keys to a thieving elite, the kind of arrangement where only they get to steal, so the money pools in fewer and fewer hands.

In real life, this is what it looks like: if you run a business, the stock does not move. A friend who sells electronics in Luthuli told me that in his good years, back in the 2010s, he shifted serious volume and was, in real terms, a millionaire. These days, he is lucky to sell one cheap Chinese TV a week. Last I heard, he may close shop.
You can see it in black tax too, which keeps climbing. I told Gordon Opiyo recently that we should be careful about celebrating the rise in diaspora remittances. That money is not flowing home to buy Treasury bonds or build anything; it is flowing home to plug the holes that government irresponsibility keeps tearing open in people’s lives, something both the Central Bank and the Kenyan Demographic Health Survey admit.

Ruto did not kill the Kenyan economy. It was already on life support by the time he inherited it. Whatever little resuscitation he managed, he did for himself and his cronies. Now, standing over a dead economy, all he does is dance and piss on the grave while his bloggers cheer.

None of this is to say women are not suffering. They are, and their story is theirs to tell. But what I am certain of is this: in the coming decade, a lot of men’s deaths will be hastened by the collapsing economy. Whether we lose them to drugs, to suicide, to slow depression, or to plain loss of hope, the direction is grim. If things keep tanking, I would not be shocked to see male life expectancy slide back toward the mid-50s. Broke men cannot afford decent healthcare or good food. And broke men, more than anyone, tend to lose their networks and their relationships, even within their own families. That isolation is its own quiet killer.

So, educated millennials and Gen Z men, hear me clearly.

The point of laying all this out is not to bury you. It is to get you to stop waiting for the economy, or the government, or some motivational speaker, to come and rescue you. They are not coming. The men who make it through the next ten years will be the ones who saw the storm early and built for it: who learned a skill the market actually pays for, who pooled resources with other men instead of competing in misery, who kept their bodies and their minds intact, and who refused to let shame cut them off from the people who love them. Money is the goal, yes, but the things that keep a broke man alive long enough to go and make it are boring and unglamorous: a few real friends, a reason to wake up, and the stubbornness to not check out early.

Our fathers had land and our mothers to fall back on. We were handed no Plan B. We have to become our own. Build it now, while you still can, because the times are bad, and they will get worse before they get better. The men who understand this and move will not merely survive. They will be the ones still standing when the dust settles, and the ones who get to rebuild.
Nothing messes with a man like a bad economy. And this, my friends, is not a wantam or tutam thing. This one outlasts whoever is sitting in State House

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Jordan Peterson’s method for remembering everything you read:

Stop highlighting. Stop taking notes while reading.

Read a section → close the book → write down what you remember in your own words. Reformulate it. Connect it. Criticize it.

That’s how information actually becomes part of you.

What’s your take, do you learn and retain more by actively recalling and rewriting, or by highlighting and passive note-taking?

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

I don't know if you need to read this, but things will be fine. The thing that's eating at you right now will pass.

In the autumn of 1802, a 31-year-old composer walked out to a quiet village near Vienna and wrote what reads like a goodbye letter. He was going deaf. For a man whose whole life was sound, losing his hearing was the worst thing that could happen to him. He told his brothers he had thought about ending his life, and that the only thing stopping him was the music still left inside him. He folded the letter, never sent it, and went back to work.

His name was Ludwig van Beethoven. His hearing didn't come back. It got worse. By his mid-40s he couldn't hear an orchestra play. He couldn't hear people talking across a table. Even the piano he'd played since he was a boy went silent for him. He started carrying little notebooks so friends could write down what they wanted to say.

And then, with almost no hearing left, he wrote the Ninth Symphony. The final part of it is "Ode to Joy." A man living in silence wrote the most joyful music anyone had heard. It premiered in Vienna on a spring night in 1824. Beethoven stood near the orchestra and waved his arms to music only he could hear. Another conductor quietly kept the players in time. When the piece ended, he was still going, with no idea what was happening behind him. A young singer named Caroline Unger walked over and turned him around. The whole hall was on its feet, hats and handkerchiefs in the air. He could see them, but he couldn't hear a sound. Some people in the room were crying.

That melody he wrote in total silence is now the official anthem of Europe. Two hundred years later, people still tear up when they hear it.

Sitting in that village in 1802, he was sure his life was over. The thing the whole world would remember him for was still twenty-two years away, and he couldn't see it from where he sat.

You can't see yours either. The hard part is loud right now because it's here. The good part is quiet because it hasn't shown up yet.

It passes. It always passes. And then it's fine again.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

There's a 14-year study that quietly explains every brilliant person you know who never did anything with it.

Karen Arnold tracked 81 high school valedictorians from the class of 1981 for 14 years. They kept getting top grades in college. They landed solid, respectable careers. And almost none of them ever broke new ground or built anything that mattered. Her own description of the group: not mold-breakers. "They get school," she said.

That's the whole tell. School measures one trait with religious intensity, which is how well you execute work that someone else assigns and grades. Valedictorian is the trophy for being the single best person in the building at completing other people's instructions. It is a real skill. It also has a brutal expiration date. The morning after graduation, the assignments stop coming and nobody ever hands you the rubric again.

Now look at the "mid" people who outran them. While the valedictorian was perfecting the assigned task, the B-students were getting comfortable with the ungraded one. Cold outreach. Starting things that might publicly fail. Asking for the raise. Building an audience before anyone gave permission. School tests for none of that. The world after school tests for almost nothing else.

Which is why the MIT math kid tending bar in Florida is the most interesting person in this post, not the cautionary tale he's being filed as. He stopped optimizing for a scoreboard built by someone else. The writer has enough money to walk away from the whole game and is calling that condition "burned out." By their own math, the smartest move described anywhere in the thread is the one they're too scared to make.

School spends 18 years rewarding you for never once questioning the assignment. Then it sets you loose in a world where the entire game is choosing your own.

[Doug E @kipkalom]

@mnandii @channelyakele @tomatomact17715 @denniskioko By enforcing speed limits only, motorists will begin taking safety more seriously and it will spill over to other aspects. I support maximum pain for offenders.

[Fav ⛧ @Favwontmiss]

HABITS I STOLE FROM ADHD ADULTS WHO ACTUALLY HAVE THEIR LIFE TOGETHER.

Not the willpower people who burn out by March. The ones who quietly rigged their whole life so the brain can't sabotage it.

Save this. Number 6 is the one nobody talks about.

[Doug E @kipkalom]

@Onorpik If it yields 10T of silage....getting 7bob per kg is premium price

[Doug E @kipkalom]

We Mzee

[Mark Kaplan @markkaplan20]

I want to tell you about a two-time Nobel Prize winner who figured out why humans get heart disease and almost every other animal does not.

His name was Linus Pauling. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He is the only person in history to win two unshared Nobel Prizes.

In 1989 he published something that should have changed cardiology forever.

He called it the Unified Theory of Human Cardiovascular Disease.

Nobody listened.

[Erling Haaland @Erling]

Viking blood 🇳🇴

[Doug E @kipkalom]

@fndaga @Masyula_kioko Knowing Kenyans...I would never pass a chance to own a car wit something similar to my name 🤣

[Matiullah Jan @Matiullahjan919]

Israel’s iron dome didn’t see this coming from Pakistan

[Jiang Xueqin @xueqinjiang]

My analysis on the US-Iran War: https://t.co/lkdCMLKgyZ

[1926 Live @100YearsAgoLive]

The Alliance High School, Kikuyu (AHS) opens its doors, becoming the first school in Kenya to offer secondary education to Africans.

[Doug E @kipkalom]

Kwani mmeficha "a knight of seven kingdoms" kama mihadarati? What platform is it on?.....thought it was showmax.
Hakuna hata spoilers online....